There have been quite a few times, especially when working on headless systems, that I've found it useful to have a live image that defaults to serial rather than VGA. That way I can quickly get into a shell and start poking around. To make my life easier, I just made a little USB drive that's configured to do just that. It's nothing crazy, just simple config edits to grub and syslinux to make these settings the default.
First, you need to download a Debian Live Install image. You can get those here, and I recommend downloading the xxx-standard.iso—you probably don't need a DE for this.
I used Rufus to flash that image to a flash drive. Make sure to select ISO mode.
Once it's flashed, open up the drives contents and repalace the existing isolinux and boot directories with the corresponding directories in this repo. Or if you just want to copy the needed files, copy and replace the following:
- /boot/
- grub/
- grub.cfg
- install.cfg
- install_start.cfg
- grub/
- /isolinux/
- install.cfg
- live.cfg
Then, you should be able to boot from this, and the serial console output can be accessed using standard settings (115200 baud, 8N1).
